The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry

3. MASCULINE ANGST REVISITED: The Anguished Black Men of “Like a Winding Sheet,” “Has Anybody Seen Miss Dora Dean?” and “Miss Muriel”

58 3 masculine angst revisited The Anguished Black Men of “Like a Winding Sheet,” “Has Anybody Seen Miss Dora Dean?” and “Miss Muriel” The thought of her husband roused in her a deep and contemptuous hatred. At his every approach she had forcibly to subdue a furious inclination to scream out in protest. Shame, too, swept over her at every thought of her marriage. Marriage. This sacred thing of which parsons and other Christian folk ranted so sanctimoniously, how immoral—according to their own standards—it could be! But Helga felt also a modicum of pity for him, as for one already abandoned. She meant to leave him. And it was, she had to concede, all of her own doing, this marriage. Nevertheless, she hated him. —Nella Larsen, Quicksand Part of Janie’s dilemma in Their Eyes is that she is both subject and object— both hero and heroine—and Hurston apparently could not retrieve her from that paradoxical position except in the frame story, where she is talking to her friend and equal, Phoeby Watson. As object in that text, Janie is often passive when she should be active, deprived of speech when she should be in command of language, made powerless by her three husbands and by Hurston’s narrative strategies. —Mary Helen Washington, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960 As novelists such as Nella Larsen and black feminist scholars such as Mary Helen Washington have contended, domesticity and its cherished institutions—marriage, motherhood—often short-circuited black female subjectivity, though occasionally affording women moderate degrees of fulfillment and occasional power. But in contradistinction to Harlem Renaissance luminaries like Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry doesn’t limit her critique of the home as a site that stymies women’s quests for fulfillment or even as a bulwark against an impenetrably patri- 59 masculine angst revisited archal external world; witness the mélange of horrors experienced by The Street’s denizens, regardless of gender or marital status. Complementarily, she hones in on the spatio-gendered role of the home space as it relates to black men’s psychological evolution—or devolution. In essence Petry engages in something of a discursive reversal by interrogating black masculinity through the lens of the domestic. For instance, while marriage may severely hamstring black women’s self-actualization (e.g., Hurston’s Janie Crawford and Larsen’s Helga Crane and Irene Redfield in Quicksand and Passing, respectively), in Petry’s fictive universe, it can also psychologically destabilize black men. Her re-imaging of domestic place and black male psychic space lends credence to Maurice Wallace’s claim that “for black masculine life as in black masculinist literature, the home would seem to constitute a tropic preoccupation” (120). Analogously, men in a variety of enclosed spaces other than the home— bars, pharmacies, barbershops, factories—is a recurrent discursive situation , as these spaces facilitate Petry’s explorations of black male interiority . While she often situates men in predominantly all-female milieus (most notably in the companionate short stories “Miss Muriel” and “The New Mirror,” as well as in “In Darkness and Confusion”), she also scrutinizes male homosociality to explore myriad issues—sexuality and sexual liminality, transgressive or non-normative sexualities, gender roles as performative and unstable, the pitfalls of patriarchal/hegemonic ideals. Thus, her emphasis on the space–masculine identity nexus and her characters ’ challenges or adherences to univocal notions of gender and sexuality evince themselves in nuanced portrayals that, in retrospect, might be considered radical in scope and execution. The spectrum of men who populate Petry’s story-worlds includes recognizable figures: itinerant blues-singing, piano-playing Chink Johnson in “Miss Muriel,” who bemoans that “all us black folks is lost” (18) and who isn’t emotionally fulfilled until he terrorizes a feeble white shoe repairman ; and Petry’s most famous male protagonist, Johnson in “Like a Winding Sheet,” whose racially toxic work environment and his failure to enjoy the benefits that naturally accrue to white men lead him to brutally beat his black wife to death. But as she does in The Narrows, Petry takes care to depict men who might be considered non-normative subjects, char- the radical fiction of ann petry 60 acters who inhabit unstable or non-orthodox positions as sexual and gendered subjects. One story features a tormented character who troubles the line separating male and female in his...